Surprise, surprise! Students! I was quite surprised to see 4 students when I showed up for class tonight at 7. Now, many students in Shenzhen don’t have hometowns to go back to for the winter holiday; this is their hometown. So they stay here and eat with family, watch a lot of TV, and try to tackle their massive amount of winter holiday homework. So I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised to see so many would be a more appropriate thing to say. Well, I had 4 students and no real lesson plan. I had the book that my training center provides, of course, and some handouts that went with it, but no one wants to do the book. We went through it for about 40 minutes, and then I had to switch gears or the students would’ve died of boredom.List It I decided to do on e of my favorite handouts, an ESL worksheet called “List It.” This worksheet actually comes from another site, but I can’t remember which one, and I’ve always had a hard time searching for it. I do know that you have to pay to get it, but one of our wiser teachers years ago somehow got a lot of worksheets from that particular site for free. They must have paid, and I can only hope that they expensed it. Anyway, the worksheet is your typical categories worksheet, where you give the students a letter and they have to think of 10 things that start with that letter. There are 6 “Lists” on the worksheet, so I usually roll a dice and off we go. Let’s say we get List 1. There will be 10 categories that the students have to write on, and they’ll be things like:

Boy’s Name

Musical Instrument

Hot Food

Singer’s Name

Animal with Four Legs

I always throw a few letters on the board, ask for others, and then we vote. So let’s say that everyone wants to do the Letter T. That means for that List 1, you could have answers like:

Boy’s Name = Tom

Musical Instrument = Tambourine

Hot Food = Tacos

Singer’s Name = Taylor Swift

Animal with Four Legs = Tiger

You can see it’s pretty easy. Some teachers I know use a game called “Scattegories” which is very similar. You can get a free download of Scattegories here.Pay or Steal? I’d like to search around a bit more and try to find “List It.” If I don’t, I think I’ll just go ahead and put a copy up on this site. No one ever looks at it anyway, so what harm could be done? Most ESL teachers in China know that they have to go around and get lots of pictures for vocabulary PowerPoint Presentations, and they’re not too worried about paying for them. What would one more free worksheet hurt, right? Well, to make a long story short, the last 20 minutes before our break went really smooth with the “List It” worksheet. I highly recommend it or similar worksheets when your students are about to drop dead from boredom.Want More Cool Worksheets? Check out these sites that offer free worksheets. Simple Handoutshttp://www.usingenglish.com/handouts/ Lesson Plan Worksheetshttp://www.esl-galaxy.com/lessons.htm